Let's talk about channels

Yeah, it used to be like that, but there were a lot less people running HT back then. Even if there weren't, do we really want high level people to spend that many hours on hunting a manon's cry? With 9 channels in play currently, it's still an ok situation. Reduce that number to 5 and you're going to run into entire squads or guilds camping all the ch's.

I don't really see a reason to make it even more obnoxious then it already is. Your argument is that it's a fair thing to ask for entering a late game boss, but when camping a channel for only one of the 5 items you need to enter the cave takes longer then multiple runs of the actual boss, I think that's an issue. There is just no interesting gameplay to be found there. Nobody enjoys sitting in a map waiting for a boss to spawn for multiple hours. With area bosses, this is optional, but to enter HT its neccesary. You could argue HT itself is optional, but I would disagree on that, seeing that many high leveled people only log in to HT, because it's one of the only interesting late game things to do, at least in their opinion.

I think it would be interesting to make a poll later among HT runners to see what the average opinion is on this matter.

 

Imo I don't understand why the main discussion is based off of one training map/mob.
Reducing the channels is probably a good thing I'd personally also like a sizeable party exp buff (Mainly for when you have 4+ ACTIVE players) so the more players in your party the more exp you'll all gain to encourage party grinding more. Also maybe buff older maps that aren't used and have spawn on them (partially) based off of player count in the map as another encouragement for partying.
Would create less issues with finding a map in popular spots as it'd be in everyones favor to party as many people as possible, discourage leeching as you'd get more exp being in a large active party (Afkers wouldn't recieve the extra party exp) and thus more efficient.

 

Like many things in Old Maplestory that are obnoxious, I can see how this prequest can be annoying, but its not only for HT runners, but also to Bishops who need Genesis and Holy Charge for Paladins. Making the change for this prequest is unnecessary because the way it should be is not easy and fast (that is not how pre bb works). Changing the way how one area boss or quest works for the most rewarding boss is not needed, especially how HT runners complain that the market for books is dropping and that the boss is not easy. Keeping the prequests as it is, is a way to make the overall experience a more competitive one (and it should be like that in my opinion). The players who are able to HT will keep on increasing and that is expected, but that is only a part of the server's growth and the competition for other things will also increase too (and that is fine).

 

The examples you give (gene and holy charge) are really bad examples because they only need to be done once and not before every boss run. I can think of some other more relevant examples myself so I still understand your argument regardless, so it doesn't really matter.
But just because many tedious things already exist in the game does not mean we should make every change follow that same line, as we already have enough of these things.

Recently books have been dropping in price because there are currently many squads doing HT as there are a lot more people in the late game stages of the game now. I share your point of view of having a more competitive experience around that area instead of the mindless HT farming that's going on right now, I just don't think making the prequest harder (or well, I guess more time consuming) is the right way to tackle this issue. HT has been nerfed earlier this year, while it was meant to be a buff, which was a very sad thing to see. I'd like us to look at ways to make the actual boss fight a bit harder instead, which in turn also makes it more interesting and competitive.

Your way of balancing the current HT madness does make it a lot more competitive, our solutions probably have the same outcome. It's just about what players would rather do, camp a manon map and argue with guilds and squads that hold all the maps for multiple hours, or make the actual boss fight more challenging. And I would rather balance around the latter.

 

The "HT nerf" isn't an intended nerf, but it was how the skills worked, the challenging factor was that some things were random (sed targets/spawns) and thus there was no way to work around a true RNG factor, but the HT we have now has been figured out a long time ago and is easy to know when is HT doing x/y/z. I do agree HT is not difficult and we need an even stronger boss to challenge the players, but I know HT wont be changed to give a more challenging fight (unless made custom or made to do more damage etc..) but making the entry barrier easier is not a solution to losing 3 channels. A part of the prequests being time consuming is always Manon camping, and camping Manon is part of the visible competition you and other HT runners will feel because Manon is limited by quantity (6 spawns a day in 6 channels) vs the other items needed which drop from regular mobs.

I am open to suggesting more challenging content but I oppose changing current things that do not need to be changed for reasons like channel amount reduction which ultimately affects the entire server and everything else and not just HT runners.

 

I'm just wondering about Petri map, the end game training/leeching map. People have hardcore grinding sessions, whether if it's a mage training themselves, a leech seller doing packages, or a team of hero's, dks, buccs or shads grinding together, anyways people tend to grind really long sessions there, which makes mapowner turnover really low. If legends goes to 4 or 5 channels, I honestly think there will be a lack of maps for petris. I totally agree that 9 channels is unnecessary for the number of players active now, but I think we should reduce to 6 or 7 first and see how it goes.

 

This thread had just became a Horntail pre-quest defending case.

We didn't had 9 channels in the past and the purpose of 9 channel was for the increased "population" at that time.

It was a solution to address the inflated population and NOT because we had to camp for Horntail. If the additional channels are added for Horntail purposes, it is a Very Valid Case but it is not. It just does not stand ground at all. It is a biased case.

The issue is that you are mostly effected and impacted by this change because you belong to the horntail farming community.

Worst come to worst, just add a dungeon for Manon. We still have 9 maps with low number of channels. (Its hard to please everyone just like policy making.)

 

And I guess that is where our opinions are different. I don't think forcing competition into something like manon camping or waiting for hours until something spawns is the right way to go. Nobody is craving for a camp the manon competition.

You argue that it's wrong to change one thing when the entire server/world also suffers from the same backlash, but I just can't agree here. The manon issue is a very unique one. If some other boss is killed or a training map is full you always have other options to go do. But if you have a HT run tomorrow and you only have time to get your cry now and all manon maps are being camped, that's a very different scenario as there are no alternatives besides saying you can't go or waiting for even longer then 4 hours if all campers are motivated to stay until it spawns which is likely the case.

Also I'm not saying that I want to have it easier. I think it's fine right now and that making it harder would be a bad thing. You can simply adjust the spawn to however many channels we will have. So if we go from 9 to 6 channels you can make the spawn 2hr 40min, which makes it how it's like right now.

 

Just prepare earlier to get your manon. Manon just happened to be used as a prequest for HT, bosses like anego are for sure camped but for different incentives, reducing the spawn timer for 1 boss is unfair. And I agree a lot with what Velo said, the number of channels were for a larger playerbase (reminder those players were mostly fresh to the server and finding manon was EASY) and the main issue were lower lvl maps like ulu2 and gs2, even galloperas were very busy with players grinding there and people did complain about those maps being super busy.

 

And Anego gives the reward for killing it immediatly, however Manon just drops one etc item for a 5 item quest which is a prequest for a boss that you have to kill aswell. It also gets killed for other reasons (for example the chair). Nobody wants the prequest to be easier then it is now, but if we tune down the amount of channels, it won't be like it was before, it will be a lot worse. You can't compare it to other bosses. Barely anyone wants more competition for a cry. The prequest takes long enough as it is for something you have to repeat over and over again in my opinion.

As a small example I think FoG is a very nostalgic spot that might sway some melee classes to head there instead of defaulting to GS2 if it was buffed.

 

Not to be rude but honestly people don't look at the channel population to see if a sever is busy I goto the website and look at the total sever population that's all I care about. Gs2 you may think is a problem but Skeles will be the samething late game which will require more channels as more bishops evolve and want to sell leech. You reduce that you're just creating more problems for yourself and this sever I think this year is going to be over 2000 in population when summer comes. I was a royals player and when we hit max population in the summer Skele maps were all taken 24/7 and gs2 its the life of the game. You want an easy fix for gs2 just make all ghost ship maps slimeys done deal.

Edit: Apparently people have never been 120 trying to get a skele map I'd grind there for 8 hours straight and I'm sure other bishops do the same selling leech same applies for petri.

 

To be fair I never looked at this sever for one reason hp washing... It takes 1 year for a NL to wash that was my first problem with this sever on royals ap resets were tradable meaning they could be sold. This sever will gain population its realistically the most stable and closest to vanilla and royals is filled with bugs with their new source. No other v62 source has 500 players when I started royals it was 365 population only with lots of channels and I don't know why people base population off of channel population you just get everyone to afkin in 1-4 channels.

EDIT: If players think this sever is dead there is nothing else except Maplesaga & Royals. Saga is just a custom PQ fiesta and you make no money all in early levels. Royals has a whole bunch of added content non v62 and is buggy.

 

Culprit map GS2. Mob: Slimy. Lvl 63 Hp/Exp 5800/250
Who goes there: Mainly Cleric, Bishop. less Icemage and archer.
Offender: Everyone has a cleric. If there are 500 users online, there are about 400 cleric ard. ( Exaggerated a bit)

GS1 Mob: Pac Pinky. Lvl 58 Hp/Exp 5000/200
Who goes there: No one unless i cant find a map in GS2
Why: If i can kill Slimy with heal with the same amount of hit, why should 1 go for pinky instead?

GS5 Mob Selkie Jr. Lvl 60 Hp/Exp 5500/220
Who goes there: No one unless i cant find a map in GS2
Why: Same reason as GS1

GS6 Mob Mr Anchor Lvl 68 Hp 11500/275
Who goes there: Who would seriously go there when the HP/EXP is so horrible. Twice the HP and only 25 additional EXP.

Suggestion.
Increase the EXp of Mr anchor to 435-450. This might alleviate GS2 being overcrowded since there is some incentive to move to GS6 for higher lvl cleric. This also free GS2 map for the lower lvl Cleric.


FOG
Main Mob: Mixed golem. lvl 59 Hp/Exp 6000/210
Who goes there: Everyone before Singapore map was launched. (Notorious map for KS war)
Who do not go there: Cleric/bishop; hated that place since golem is not an undead. If i wanted leech i would have gone to GS2 aka bishop haven instead.

Suggestion.
Reduce the spawn of Lupin and Cursed eyes.
Increase the spawn of the golems.
Increase Exp to 270 for mixed golem. (Seriously why is Slimy so Exp Juicy? Neckson like slimy so much?)

Alternative,
Make OPQ Great Again.
If doing OPQ is able to be at least 70% EPM of grinding/leeching in GS2, it could also reduce the overcrowding from this map.

 

I think a good idea to get people training in less popular maps is to (with monster book coming soon) give people say for example a 2.5% exp bonus for ten minutes for the monster that dropped the specific card. The cards effect can be made so that it cant be used when another card (including a card from the same monster) is already in effect. And of course these cards will drop much less for say gs2 than gs5/6, so that the amount of epm per map will be "equalized" somehow.

 

You could also add better drops to those particular maps so you have chances of making money especially for those classes that have to buy potions.(I know people like "FULL VANILLA") but if you don't make tiny changes to solve a problem like an overcrowded map then it's to stay the same because best exp in the game no one wants to grind longer if they don't have too. I would love OPQ to be close to GS2.

 

Since you bring this up, i would love to see a buff at NEWTIES. #Throwback2k15 it's pretty much dead now, i remember how awesome it was, it was an alternative of apart from the skeles map, at least for most of the old players it's nostalgic.

 

Personally I don't think that there's any need for a change, in the GS maps. There's MP3 for a reason (which is equally decent XP)

 

SIDENOTE: I don't know why people are making a big deal about gs2. Just go to MP3. It's way better exp in a 3 man party and you can make friends. I don't think any changes or dungeons need to be added to gs2. MP3 provides exp similar to windraiders leech when you have access to HS, which given the nature of gs2, it's not hard to find a 8x priest training there.

Summer is almost here and does anyone remember what popular training spots were like during winter break? It was almost impossible to find maps at petris, ulu2, and gs2 for significant portions of time. If I wanted to grind I would have to wait 2+ hours just to get one of these maps. Last weekend I was at ulu2 and all the channels were full and summer hasn't even started yet. 4 channels at petris or ulu2 when a lot of the user-base is now reaching late game seems like it's going to open the door to a lot of problems.

I think one of the issues discussed was that the server feels dead? What about when it'll become almost impossible to get a petris map because of the few people that grind 10+ hours a day? It's going to become a fiesta of guilds and friends competing to hold map owner on popular boss/training spots.

Even if you add dungeons to these maps, 8 maps? Is that enough going into the break? My guess is no.

I also want to talk about the Manon point. A lot of guilds nowadays are doing HT on a daily basis. If you make Manon available in 4 channels with a 4 hour spawn window. That's 24 spawns in a day. Considering most people go into HT with a 2 party team consisting of 12 people, that means 4 HT's can be downed per day (2 12 man runs running 2x each) on average. I'm pretty sure 20+ HT's are going down per week currently; there's just not going to be enough Manons to go around. People will resort to just sitting in HT cave day to day instead of going outside because they'll fear having to do the quest again. Is that really healthy for the game?

Obviously I don't have exact numbers and data to look at and most of this is based off anecdotal experience so maybe I just have a skewed view. Hopefully that is the case and someone can put these concerns to rest.